Copyright's Digital Dilemma Today: Fair Use or Unfair Constraints? Part I: The Battle over File Sharing

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, Oct/Nov 2003 by Strickland, Lee S

The corporate environment - from private businesses to educational institutions - is no different. According to a very recent survey by AssetMatrix, a Canadian network monitoring company, as reported by CNET News.com, the installation of P2P clients in corporate environments is more than common - it is pervasive. While this would be expected in education, it is somewhat of a surprise in private industry. The study considered over 500 companies of varying size and found that every company of 500 or more employees had at least one installation of Kazaa or similar sharing software. The president of AssetMatrix was cogent in his observation: "Corporations are frantic about how to rein in some control over this. Like with software licenses, most companies want to be on the right side of the law. The challenge is how they do that." As with the effort against educational institutions, the focus of copyright holders and the legal liability of corporations are certain - last year, the RIAA settled a copyright claim against Integrated Information Systems for $1 million. At that time the senior vice president for the RIAA noted: "This sends a clear message that there are consequences if companies allow their resources to further copyright infringement." In the most recent action (July 2), the RIAA served a DMCA subpoena on DePaul University in Chicago. This action presents the very practical issue of what quantity of offending material will trigger RIAA action. While the RIAA has previously suggested that they will target only "substantial collections," the DePaul action appears to involve a user with only a handful of potentially infringing files.

In the next issue we will continue our survey of current intellectual property developments.

Lee S. Strickland, J.D., is visiting professor in the College of Information Studies, University of Maryland; e-mail: LSTRICKL@ deans.umd.edu